Beyond the PDF: The GDA Interactive Midterm Evaluation

The European Space Agency (ESA)’s Global Development Assistance (GDA) programme has the mission to accelerate impact by fully capitalising on the power of satellite Earth Observation (EO) in international development assistance operations.

To track its progress, the GDA Midterm Evaluation provides a comprehensive overview of the programme’s journey from its inception until 2024. That evaluation was published as a traditional PDF report, which whilst a key part of the Monitoring & Evaluation process, is static and lacks interactivity.

Recognising these limitations, ESA’s GDA Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) team including David Taverner and Giulia Costella from Caribou Space, reimagined this evaluation by creating the GDA Interactive Midterm Evaluation. This innovative format is designed to be more engaging, compelling, and accessible to GDA stakeholders including International Financial Institutions, their client governments around the world, and the satellite Earth Observation industry community.

Dynamic communication: An interactive and inividualised approach

Traditional reports, websites, and other standard communication materials have inherent constraints. They do not adapt to specific individuals or their queries, often requiring extensive time to locate relevant insights within them. Traditional methods to guide readers to the exact content they are looking for including, executive summary, chapter structures, headers and sub-headers, and the famous use of “Control/Command+F” to find keywords have their limitations.

The GDA Interactive Midterm Evaluation breaks away from this history by integrating:

• Scrollytelling: A seamless, online storytelling format that guides users through key findings in an intuitive, visual manner.
• Interactive Data Visualisations: Key charts and figures are no longer static; users engage with them dynamically to understand an extract data and insights rapidly.
• Voice Assistant: A feature that allows stakeholders—such as IFI Task Team Leaders (TTLs) or their client governments—to ask specific questions and receive tailored responses directly from the evaluation. This conversational tool is like having the report’s authors available for questions at any time, on demand.

Transforming Stakeholder Engagement

This shift towards an interactive evaluation, tailored to answering individuals queries, ensures that decision-makers can engage rapidly with the findings in a way that suits their needs. Whether it’s a high-level policy inquiry or a deep dive into programme metrics, the AI-driven voice assistant and interactive design elements make navigating the evaluation effortless.

An Interactive Approach

By integrating this pioneering approach, ESA and Caribou Space are setting a new standard for how programme evaluations are presented and consumed. The future of programme evaluations is interactive, insightful, and tailored to the needs of its audience.

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